Bringing Voices Across Oceans: On Grace Talusan’s ‘The Body Papers’

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A Filipina-American author takes on immigration, sexual abuse, medical trauma, and the diaspora via the documentation of brownness and her body.
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László Krasznahorkai Comes Home

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The Hungarian master's novel cycle culminates with a fourth book full of manic humor that also happens to be precisely the book we need right now.
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That’s Her in the Spotlight, Losing Her Religion

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Cameron Dezen Hammon's debut memoir follows her from a “half-Jewish childhood” to a professional life performing in an evangelical megachurch.
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From Father Divine to Jim Jones: On the Phenomenon of American Messiahs

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Here's the thing about so-called cults: for all their tragic failings, they’ve provided the only genuine resistance to the forward march of capitalism.
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Memory Can Be a Second Chance: Ocean Vuong’s ‘On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous’

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Thoughtful and tender, Vuong's autobiographical novel is framed as a letter from a son, Little Dog, to his illiterate single mother, Rose.
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Death Liberates in a Danish Master’s New Novel

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An honest reckoning with the death of a spouse—but one in a deeply companionless marriage—and the life of two people who shared little but space.
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What If Better Penmanship Could Make You a Better Person

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That's the premise behind Uruguayan author Mario Levrero's first novel, sure to enhance his reputation as a cult figure of Latin American literature.
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Mark Haddon’s Latest Curious Incident Sails the High Seas

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Sex and attraction feature prominently throughout, as do birth and death, terror and violence—the stuff of life that hasn’t changed one bit over the eons.
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Dubravka Ugrešić Looks for Home

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There’s a palpable sorrow in her writing, culminating in moments where the wound feels especially raw.
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The True Crime Story That (Might Have) Inspired Nabokov to Write ‘Lolita’

What if the young girl from Camden was the model for the nymphet from Ramsdale? Who was Sally Horner? Who is Dolores Haze?

This New Translation of a Russian Epic Restores What Censors Stole

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Writing that was judged insufficiently socialist realist would remain unpublished, and its author might be sent to a labor camp or killed.
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Caring Is Creepy: Ian McEwan and ‘Machines Like Me’

In an era of intense specialization and branding, it is the extremely rare writer who manages to wear as many hats as McEwan does.

Rites of Spring: Does the Latest in Ali Smith’s Seasonal Quartet Satisfy?

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Several themes—migrants, ecology and the procession of the seasons, humans versus the establishment “machine”—have been building with each book.
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Me, Myself, and You: Sally Rooney’s ‘Normal People’

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In her latest novel, Rooney suggests that individual identity is actually a microcosmic social structure, made up of webbed relationships and collective agreements.
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Power Play: Reading Kristen Roupenian’s ‘You Know You Want This’

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It’s important to read characters who are burning down their lives and searching for answers to unknowable questions.
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Finding Asylum: Esmé Weijun Wang’s ‘The Collected Schitzophrenias’

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This collection does more than educate the reader. It tells of Wang’s search for the right diagnosis and a way to live with the diagnosis she’s given.
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Mama Was a Number Runner: On The World According to Fannie Davis

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A female entrepreneur from the Jim Crow South arrives in the 1950s industrial cauldron of Detroit, determined to figure out “how to make a way out of no way.”
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The Choir of Man: Max Porter’s ‘Lanny’ Wants You to Listen

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Porter's second book is an attempt to capture a village, entirely, in language, and it does so by trying to represent the village’s breadth of narrative voices.
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